Tag Archives: drug trafficking

When he was elected in July 2012 in a relative landslide, Enrique Peña Nieto thought his administration would be defined by good governance and economic, tax and energy reforms.

Above all, everyone thought that Peña Nieto would be eager to demonstrate the new look of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party), which controlled Mexico’s presidency between 1929 and 2000, with the rise of a younger generation of technocratic cabinet members, including Luis Videgaray, EPN’s finance minister.

On the second anniversary of his inauguration, however, Peña Nieto (pictured above visiting Guerrero in 2013) faces the risk of losing the narrative of his presidency with four years left in office — following the September killings of 43 university students, reminiscent of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre that is widely seen as one of the lowest points of the PRI’s 20th century rule.

So what happened in Iguala?

Photo credit to BBC.

It’s no understatement to say that Mexicans everywhere have been touched by the incredible display of violence and governmental corruption that took place on September 26, when 43 students were abducted and, allegedly, assassinated in the town of Cocula, near Iguala, the third-largest city in Guerrero state.

The office of Mexican attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam has determined that Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca ordered local police to confront the students, since he was worried that they would disrupt an important political event at which his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, was scheduled to speak.

With what appears to the approval of Iguala police chief Felipe Flores Velásquez, local officers apparently ambushed the students, (killing 6 outright), and abducted 43 more. A further 14 students successfully escaped, and were later located safely.

According to officials, Cocula’s police chief, Cesar Nava Gonzalez, ordered police to transfer the 43 captives to a local gang called Guerreros Unidos, to which Nava Gonzalez apparently belonged. The gang members then allegedly transported the students to a landfill, murdered them, burned their bodies, and dumped their remains in a local river.

The sad tale, however, becomes even more ridiculous upon further review. Los Angeles Pineda, the mayor’s wife, is allegedly known as ‘Lady Iguala’ and, along with her two brothers (both of whom were assassinated by rival gangs) was tightly connected to the Guerreros Unidos gang. Circumstantially, it appears that she used her position to leverage a considerable amount of wealth, as well as intervene on behalf of her gang. Continue reading Two years in, Iguala massacre threatens Peña Nieto presidency→

When you talk to Hondurans on the streets of San Pedro Sula, they’ll tell you they are more afraid of the police than of drug traffickers or gang members.

In a county where drug traffickers offer far higher payoffs than the salaries constrained by stretched national and local budgets, today’s hero is tomorrow’s villain, and the line between good guys and bad guys has become impossible to draw. Corruption runs high and impunity runs even higher in a country where the judicial system is incapable of prosecuting a shockingly high number of violent incidents.

Yet when Honduras’s new president Juan Orlando Hernández (pictured above at the US Capitol) came to the United States last week to meet with US president Barack Obama, he pointed fingers at US policymakers for the sudden wave of child migrants from Central America to the US border seeking asylum — 57,000 this year and counting, more than 25,000 alone from Honduras.

With nearly 8.5 million people, Honduras is the second-most populous country in Central America (after Guatemala with 14.4 million) and in the current crisis, many more child migrants have arrived at the US border from Honduras than from either Guatemala or El Salvador. For example, more children have arrived from San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s northern industrial hub than from all of Guatemala. Though Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, isn’t exactly the world’s safest city, it’s a tranquil oasis compared to San Pedro Sula and the northern coast, which is plagued with the worst of the drug-related violence that has given Honduras the world’s highest murder rate — 79.7 homicides per 100,000, amounting to around 18.5 homicides a day.

That’s one reason why the Obama administration is allegedly considering the unusual step of allowing refugees to seek asylum directly within Honduras, modeled after former programs developed for war-torn Vietnam and ravaged Haiti, a tacit acknowledgment that the human rights situation has reached dire levels.

When Hernández came to the United States last week, he was quick to blame coyotes for turning their predatory sights to Central America, and he was quick to blame the US immigration reform debate for creating ‘ambiguity’ about US policy. But above all, Hernández noted that US demand for illegal drugs fuels the trafficking that so afflicts Honduras today: Continue reading Hernández selectively blames US for child migrant crisis→

Even as Enrique Peña Nieto basks in a largely successful first year as president, capped off with a massive energy reform that will introduce elements of privatization and foreign investment to Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the state oil company, and the first step of tax reform that will raise VAT of junk food and sodas, Mexicans aren’t sure that his administration is making the same progress on security.

Nowhere is that more true than in Michoacán.

A sprawling Pacific state that unfurls from the western Mexican coast inland nearly to the capital of México City, Michoacán wasn’t necessarily predestined to become a synonym of drug-fueled anarchy. It’s not home to the Zapatista-style insurgency that former president Ernesto Zedillo faced in Chiapas in the mid-1990s, the destabilizing political protests that former president Vicente Fox faced in Oaxaca in 2006, or to the horrific body counts in Ciudad Juárez and elsewhere in Chihuahua that dominated gory headlines just a few years ago during the presidency of Felipe Calderón.

But on at least a few matters, he’ll take office with key elements of his agenda already in place, thanks to the efforts of the outgoing administration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa and the wide majority of the Partido Nacional (PN, National Party) in the outgoing Congreso Nacional (National Congress). Hernández served as president of the National Congress from 2010 to 2014. The transition from Lobo Sosa to Hernández marks the first time since the return of democracy to Honduras in 1981 that the conservative National Party will hold two consecutive presidential terms (Honduran presidents are constitutionally ineligible to run for reelection).

Hernández takes office today, but he does so after enacting several key security and fiscal policies in the final months and weeks of the Lobo Sosa administration, including a new, less controversial national police chief, a new military police force, landmark fiscal reforms (including a wide tax increase) and a plan to privatize Honduras’s public electricity company. Last weekend, the new National Congress was sworn in, which means that the National Party will control just 48 seats in the 128-member unicameral parliament, a sharp reduction from the 75-seat bloc that Hernández commanded during the Lobo Sosa era.

From ‘whatever it takes’ to ‘the party is over’

Even before the election campaign reached full swing, Hernández last September pushed through legislation authorizing the creation of a new policia militar (‘military police’) that will deploy in full force early this year, and he campaigned on a slogan to do ‘whatever it takes’ (¡voy hacer lo que tenga que hacer!) to make Honduras safe. The controversial legislation creates an elite militarized unit loyal to Hernández that (hopefully) won’t be corrupted by organized crime and drug traffickers, which have already infiltrated much of the Honduran police and military. Critics worry that the new military police could trample human rights in a country barely three decades removed from death squads. Many Hondurans fear the police more than drug traffickers and criminal gangs.

Late in December 2013, Lobo Sosa fired the head of Honduras’s national police, Juan Carlos Bonilla, known as ‘El Tigre.’ Bonilla had become a controversial figure, given alleged ties to the death squads of the 1980s. Since becoming the head of Honduras’s national police force in August 2012, Bonilla became linked to a trend of humanitarian violations at the hands of the national police, including beatings, illegal detentions and other harassment of gay and lesbian Hondurans, journalists and leftists in political opposition to the current administration. Bonilla also seemed either unwilling or unable to crack down on rampant corruption within his ranks. Given that police salaries are a pittance, however, reforming the national police force could prove just as difficult in the Hernández era as well.

Bonilla’s removal represents one less headache for Hernández, who would have continued to face ongoing skepticism from both within and outside Honduras over Bonilla’s leadership. But there’s no sign that the future will be any less corrupt or any more respectful of human rights — and no clear sign that Bonilla’s successor, Ramón Sabillón, previously the commander of the national police’s special investigations division, will do any better.

Stabilizing Honduras will be Hernández’s top challenge in the next four years, and he’s staked his presidency on doubling down with a military solution rather than a strategy of community-based policing. Though the United Nations The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recorded a rate of 91.6 per 100,000 in 2011, but the Violence Observatory at the National Autonomous University of Honduras estimated a rate of 85.5 in 2012 and just 80 per 100,000 in 2013. While that’s a significant drop, it still means that Honduras has the world’s highest homicide rate.

In his inaugural address today, Hernández declared that for criminals, se le terminó la fiesta (‘the party is over), and he wasted no time in announcing a massive military operation, Operácion Morazán, named after Honduras’s founding father. To that end, Hernández indulged a demonstration at his inauguration earlier today of Los Tigres, one unit of Honduras’s increasingly militarized network of squads and paramilitary police forces (pictured above).

Rigoberto Chang Castillo, a top Hernández ally, has become Honduras’s new interior and population minister, and rising National Party star Reinaldo Sánchez will become the minister of the presidency.

Bilateral relations with the United States and drug policy

One of the most surprising aspects to Hernández’s inaugural address, however, was a stern admonishment of US drug policy. Declaring a double standard, Hernández spoke out against the United States for its role in Honduras’s state, noting that North American demand for drugs has fueled so much violence throughout Latin America, and that while drugs are merely a ‘health’ issue for US consumers, it’s a matter of life and death for Honduras, which fights traffickers with limited resources — and the blood of its own people: Continue reading Hernández takes office with agenda already largely in place→

Though Venezuela’s crumbling economy was the top issue in 2013, the country’s violent crime rate is now topping the 2014 agenda after the horrific murder of Mónica Spear, the 29-year-old television star and 2004’s Miss Venezuela, and her ex-husband were shot in an attempted robbery, after their car broke down on a highway Monday night.

Violent crime in Venezuela didn’t spring up overnight, but even president Nicolás Maduro admits that 2013 saw a rise in crime. But it’s been on the rise throughout the chavista era. It’s a topic that I discussed earlier today on Fusion’s America with Jorge Ramos (in my first-ever live television interview — next time, I need to know where to put my eyes!).

When Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1999, he and his advisors thought that reducing crime in Venezuela was a matter of reducing poverty and inequality. For all the faults of chavismo, you can point to a substantial reduction in poverty and inequality since 1999, though there’s obviously some debate as to whether the chavistas accomplished that goal in the most efficient, effective or sustainable manner.

Yet even as poverty decreased, violent crime increased steadily over the Chávez era. Official figures aren’t available (and it’s doubtful they would be reliable even if they were), butObservatorio Venezolano de Violencia, an NGO that tracks violent crime, claims that the homicide rate is 79 per 100,000 — a rise in 2013 from a rate of 73 in 2012. That makes Venezuela second only to Honduras, with a 2012 homicide rate of 91.6 per 100,000.

If there’s one point to take away about the link between poverty and violent crime, it’s that the poorest Venezuelans are more likely to be victims of crime themselves. Crime is higher in the cities than in the countryside, and it is highest yet in the barrios of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas — you’re much likelier to be murdered in the more lawless neighborhoods in the mountains overlooking downtown Caracas than in the wealthier and safer valley below. While every murder is a tragedy, Spear’s death is just one of tens of thousands annually. Justice rarely comes for many of those anonymous victims and their families, given that crimes are rarely investigated and even more rarely prosecuted.

Crime is a complex sociological phenomenon, so it’s not easy to point to one variable in particular as its direct cause. Poverty may play a role, but it’s not a matter of ‘if x, then y.’ In the case of Venezuela, the more relevant factors include a high gun ownership rate, corruption and low trust in public institutions, and a climate of political polarization. But the biggest factor is the weakening of the rule of the law over the past 15 years.

As Juan Nagel writes in Foreign Policy, Venezuela has very few judges and prosecutors, and many of them are corrupt. Policemen and other officials commonly take bribes. Jails are overcrowded and controlled by the criminals locked inside them. No one has much faith in the justice system. If you look at the 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index, Venezuela is ranked 160. Afghanistan, North Korea and Somalia are tied for dead-last at 175. That should tell you quite a bit about Venezuela’s culture of impunity. It’s not just the justice system, either. It’s the kind of ‘democracy’ whereby all of the state organs, from state media to the electoral commission to the courts to Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), the state oil company, have all been politicized and are today essentially levers to boost chavismo. It’s the kind of ad hoc economic policymaking where rules change from one day to the next, or the Venezuelan president can expropriate a business or nationalize an industry on a whim. That, too, corrodes the rule of law.

That’s also why there’s very little chance that Maduro or any chavista regime is likely to reverse the decade-long trend of greater violent crime. Despite a high-profile photo op with opposition leader and Miranda state governor Henrique Capriles (pictured above), Maduro (like Chávez before him) has worked to strip municipal and state governments of much of their autonomy by consolidating power over local budgets under the national government. That’s especially true for states and municipalities controlled by the opposition. Continue reading Chavismo offers no solutions for Venezuela’s violent crime→

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